You’ve made it to Friday afternoon, congrats! A time to doss around and count down the hours until you can clock off and hit the pub. What better way to wind the clock along than tucking in to The Boarding Kennel’s pick of the week’s most interesting board gaming bits from around the web?
XCOM: THE BOARD GAME
The big one everyone in board game (and some video game) circles has been waiting for dropped at the end of last month – XCOM: The Board Game. A beloved turn-based strategy video game from the 1990s, UFO: Enemy Unknown, got shined up into a brand new whizzy reboot in 2012 as XCOM: Enemy Unknown and made the entire video gaming press simultaneously fall over with how brilliant it was. XCOM: The Board Game takes that reboot and attempts to translate it to the tabletop, with the novel addition of a digital app to bustle you along and do some of the maths. Shut Up and Sit Down have the skinny on the game here.
GHOSTBUSTERS: THE BOARD GAME
Another classic franchise to be reimagined in plastic and cardboard is Ghostbusters, which launched onto Kickstarter three days ago and almost immediately exploded past its $250,000 target like a containment unit inadvisably shut down by the US Environmental Protection Agency. It’s got all the stuff you’d expect like PKE meters, ECTO-1 and Slimer, and sees each player control one of the four heroes wandering round proton-packing and trapping ghosts. An obvious worry is that it’ll look lovely but the underlying game will be dire, but we live in hope. Seems a bit light on ghost types as well, but maybe that a side-effect of me playing so much Ghost Stories. You’ve got until March 12 to get in on the funding at the Kickstarter site here. It’s $125 with P&P to most of the world though – whoosh!
LACERUNNER
Game designer and lecturer Naomi Clark has revealed she’s working on a beautiful Victorian-themed reskin for cyberpunk card game Netrunner, changing corporations to noble houses and tasking them with defending their households from riff-raff such as anarchic Revolutionaries and the social-climbing Bourgeoisie. Sounds like the game maps over amazingly well, with runs replaced by attempting to make social appearances and ICE representing things like obnoxious guests at parties. Anyone who prefers early morning duels and demands of etiquette to hacking servers and plugging junk into your brain should check out this piece from thinking-person’s gaming website Kill Screen.